Sales of unauthorized $5 copies at flea markets and street vendor booths have boosted Smith's self-reported sales to more than 60,000 and brought the young businessman online inquiries and attention from across the country and overseas.

Smith said he meant his film to be a cutting-edge documentary showing how crack had taken over his West End neighborhood. After finishing his studies at North Carolina Central University in 1996, Smith said he moved to Atlanta and bought a house in 1999. But the crack problem was so bad on his block, he had to sell his house and move a few blocks away.

Things got worse.

Smith said he started videotaping crack-addicted neighbors and acquaintances to chronicle how fast and hard they fell.

"I watched the people in the neighborhood deteriorate," he said.

"People really don't know how bad it is. I have over 100 hours of film."

About the same time Smith took to the streets with his camcorder, Tanya Telfair Sharpe, an anthropologist and sociologist, was interviewing crack-addicted women in Atlanta shelters and treatment centers as part of a 10-year scientific study sponsored by the National Institutes of Health and National Institute on Drug Abuse. Her research was compiled in the book, "Behind the Eight Ball: Sex for Crack Cocaine Exchange and Poor Black Women." Sharpe now works as a research behavioral scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

"I'm trying to get people to see what a terrible problem crack is in the black community," Sharpe said. "The devastating effect on black families is unprecedented."

Inner-city neighborhoods suffering from poverty, hopelessness and despair provided an optimal stronghold for crack when it emerged on the drug scene in the 1980s.

It provided a cheap high for one of the most marginalized segments of society. And crack sales filled an economic void for some young black men.

But a chemical, produced when powder cocaine is burned to make crack, makes this drug highly addictive. The chemical reacts with dopamine in the brain, causing irreparable damage and creating an intense craving for more that, according to research, doesn't seem to go away.

"There's something in it that changes peoples' behavior and reduces them to almost zombies," Sharpe said. "We drastically need more research."

Crack users start out spending all they earn to get high. When addiction makes it impossible for them to go on working and their money runs out, they sell everything they can get their hands on to support their endless desire for crack.

"They start selling things off until there's nothing left but their bodies," Sharpe said.

Crack has ravaged generations of poor families for more than two decades - wreaking havoc on the families, neighborhoods, health, law enforcement, school and social service systems dealing with the fallout.

Yet there is still no consistent intervention plan to address crack addiction in the nation, Sharpe said.

"They don't have a champion," she said.

As a result, the communities forced to deal with crime and other social burdens brought on by crack addicts have become frustrated and callous. Some begin to look at the desperate addicts as less than human and exploit their willingness to do anything for a high.

When Smith found he couldn't profit from his real estate investments because of his neighborhood crack problem, he used his neighborhood crack-problem videos instead, he said.

Demand is so high, he is currently working on a sequel, Crackheads Gone Wild 1.5.

People have been willing to pay to watch glassy-eyed old men dance for the camera, or offer up everything from second-hand underwear and their bodies for $5.

Smith weaves in statistical data on crack cocaine and has several addicts tell what crack has done to their lives.

"One guy talked about how he got shot in the leg and the guy who did it gave him $50 worth of crack not to go to the hospital or tell police," Smith recalls. "So he just tied his shirt around his leg and left the bullet in there. He walks with a limp to this day."

But he devotes much of the movie to getting people in crack houses and on street corners to show just how low they will go for crack. It's what the people want, Smith said.

"Even the name 'Crackheads Gone Wild' is for shock value. If I had named it 'Drug addicts in Atlanta,' I would have sold three copies," he said.